The app Gas is a new form of social media that has spread like wildfire throughout high schools around the nation, with the recent rise in apps that try and get high school students to engage with each other online and outside of the classroom. The app currently is only on Apple phones and unavailable on other phone types.

What makes it unique from other social media is its anonymity. Rather than posting, liking, and sharing content, Gas is centered around the voting of your friends on various polls, all of which are anonymous in who chooses them. The app gives the user a prompt and four names of the student’s friends or peers to choose from to best fit that statement, the prompts are typically lighthearted and fun, and meant to uplift or “gas up” their friends. 

Gas encourages students to praise their friends and give them compliments, the app doesn’t allow the user to send direct messages to other students, but it does have a direct feed that shows the user’s friends messages or nominations that the user had gotten. Whenever the user completes the twelve polls that are given, they are rewarded with coins that can be used in the shop to buy one of two options. One option is to spend 100 coins to add the user’s name to three random polls and the other is 300 coins to add your name to a specific person’s poll. 

One of the app’s main attractions is to secretly vote for your “crush” and another feature is that the user can pay to reveal the first letter of the user who voted for them. You can pay $5 a week to get unlimited hints on polls, reveal two names of who sent it, double coins, alerts when someone adds their name to your polls, and the ability to send polls to people. 

While there have been allegations of human traffickers using the app to lure kids, all these rumors have been proved wrong and there is no proof to suggest there are any human trafficking affiliations related to the app. Overall the app is lighthearted and has no intentions of malice and Gas is harmless fun for students to enjoy, at least until the next microtrend kicks in.